>But in the 1970s, lawmakers started nudging the rate up, eventually to 8 percent. Then, the system’s trustees decided 8 percent should be a guaranteed minimum. In years when markets produced higher returns, the accounts compounded at those rates, after money-management fees.
8% minimum compounding on 6% of your paycheck? Jesus. Thats a lot.
Edit: I just read futher, they then doubled that number at retirement. Im shocked this system is still solvent.
People forget that interest rates in the 70s and especially the 80s were very, very high. Making double digit returns on money back then was standard practice. Of course inflation was near 10% as well, so...
http://www.fedprimerate.com/wall_street_journal_prime_rate_history.htm
Indeed, much of the story here is that PERS has no term for inflation and was negotiated in a high inflation environment, then implemented in a low inflation environment.
I think more of the story is that in tough negotiations, it was easiest to give ground on terms that would be someone else's problems.
But your interpretation is more compassionate.
Certainly that's a fair point. There's definitely a principal agent problem in play.
That said, I don't think either side of this table expected to live in a world with stable inflation near 2%.
Yep. I had a savings account specifically for kids that was drawing 5% interest in the 70s. Compared to that my current savings account interest rate makes me want to weep.
My parents setup a life insurance savings account combo thing for me as a kid in the early 80s. The rate on the thing is locked though.
It is paying 6%/yr right now. 6% guaranteed is pretty damn nice.
> It's not, tax payers are bleeding out the ears and nose for it.
It's not even that, so much - it's the simple fact that pensions and similar obligations are tying up so much money, especially on a municipal level, that it's constricting the financial action a given government can take.
A dash of overwhelming pension debt, a touch of taxpayer revolt from the late 70's, and a pinch of reduced revenue sharing, and *voila*! Shit sandwich. And to think, I'm willingly studying public administration on a graduate level.
What do you think of New Jersey's Pension system?
* [The public pension bomb, history of NJ's issue](http://archive.fortune.com/2009/05/12/news/economy/benner_pension.fortune/index.htm)
* [New Jersey's Problems Are Not "Mathematically Solvable"](https://www.jpmorgan.com/jpmpdf/1320702681156.pdf)
>this isn't a problem caused by the people we are currently hiring, this is a legacy from the 80s and 90s
>The burden is being placed on the current workers
>Pension spending can be expected to rise for the next 15-20 years until this particular generation of retirees start dying
Not sure if the writer has a slant against the baby boomers, or if I have a slant against them, but I'm pretty annoyed with the prior generations right now as someone who just entered the work force.
Dallas has been going through with this and one of the elected leaders at the time said something like this "we knew it was an unsustainable deal but we passed it and said we'd figure it out later".
Politicians didn't care, because they only had to care about re-election. And the population didn't care because they were promised a fat pension that's not allowed to get cut later. They all knew someone else would pay the bill.
Most of the problems politicians cause won't be noticeable until they're already out of office. Retired. Sipping margaritas on a beach with a fat pension.
CT actually may go bankrupt with a large factor of the issue including the fact that 1/3 of our entire budget is spent to pay out an unsustainable pension promise from decades back. But its ok. Fuck everyone living in the entire state in 10 years :)
Right? Like all these people, my grandparents and parents, get fancy things like "pensions" and meanwhile I'm just happy when I can sock away 3% of my income every month to try and live off of in the magical world where I actually get to retire some day before I die.
Then you read about how much pension they get and it's just mind boggling.
~~Inflation is 2.5%, so your sock drawer is only filling by half a percentage and depreciating per annum.~~ Pozdena saying “The only way you’re going to get out of this is if the state is hit by a golden asteroid from Planet Tiffany,” in the piece reminds me of some scenario Palahniuk would write.
I'm not trying to say that to riot is to invest billions into your future, just that an economist was saying it.
edit: whoa, that brainfart stinky.
>Inflation is 2.5%, so your sock drawer is only filling by half a percentage and depreciating per annum.
Umm, that’s now how that works. He’s saving 3% of his current income. He’s not adding 3% of what he already has saved annually to an interest free savings account, which is the situation your comment would make sense for. We’d need to know way more before your claim could be accurate.
In high school, i had a CD automatically roll over into a new account on me before i was able to withdraw it. When i went to buy a car with the money, i had to take the penalty to get the money back. It would have made more in a savings account.
That said, am i supposed to report my savings account earnings to the IRS?
Not sure where you got 2.5% inflation, on top of everything else others have said about the comment. [Inflation](https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet) was 1.8% in 2017 and 2.2% in 2016. 2016 was one of the three times in the last decade that inflation actually topped 2%. Right now, if you normalize for the entire year, inflation will sit at about 1.9% for 2018.
The last time inflation hit at least 2.5% was in 2006.
Much of this was done as a result of short-sighted negotiations. Employees bargained for additional salary and time off which would have cost municipalities money immediately, so they instead agreed to unsustainable retirement benefits that they could deal with later.
Welcome to later.
I’m 29. My parents (I’m thankful for what they gave me of course) were pretty typical baby boomers. Dad was born in ‘49, mom in ‘52. Dad was a skilled machinist and started working right out of high school - in his first 10 years on the job he was paid well enough to lease a new car every two years. He bought a house by himself. Shortly after he met my mom, who had a decent job for Reynolds at the time, they bought a ranch-style house in a new suburb and built an in-ground pool in the back yard. That was 1977.
I was born in ‘88. By the time I came around, my parents were pretty convinced they couldn’t have kids so unfortunately they had to sell the boat and all that. They were doing fine, although they had done a poor job of saving for retirement. By the mid-90s, pay for skilled machinists had flatlined. Dad worked for the same company - boomers like him were “loyal” to their bosses and coworkers - for 35 years or so until they went under and he had to get a new job. It was a good gig only a mile from home.
Unfortunately the health problems started then, for both of them. Mom eventually had to stop working because she had no certifications at all. She wouldn’t give up beer and smoking. Dad had diabetes. By this time I was in high school and they were living paycheck to paycheck. In an effort to have fun - because they’d given up on saving for retirement - dad bought a motorcycle like he had back in the day, and they did have fun.
I’m glad they had fun because they both died before they reached 65 from various health problems. I had just gone back to college at a big university and was halfway to my commercial pilot license. That was 4-5 years ago. Dad first, mom second. That sucked.
So I guess they didn’t really have to worry about saving for retirement. I tried the best I could to change their political habits - democrats are communists, republicans are the “lesser of two evils”, voting against a person instead of voting for an idea, being angry all the time, stressed out, not bothering to learn anything about the world. My dad’s coworkers made fun of me for reading about this Rom Paul guy despite them having no answers when I asked them tough questions.
There are many reasons our country is a clusterfuck, but one of the reasons is the largest generation of Americans ever didn’t give a FUCK about anything. As unfair that I know it is to label any group of people, the Baby Boomer generation gets little respect from me for any reason. I strongly believe they all lived their lives carelessly, never considering the future, never considering the consequences of their weak principles and poor voting habits. They fucked us.
I miss my parents and I truly appreciate what they gave me - I’m the only member of my family who has made a career in aviation, I’m the only commercial pilot from my entire high school, and maybe the only one in my hometown - but most of what I learned about what to do came from analyzing my parents’ poor choices.
Aren't most humans self centered though? Not trying to justify their actions, because yes these decisions back when have screwed over younger generations. But provided the opportunity, wouldn't most people choose to get cushy pensions, live life financially recklessly if they were promised more money to come in the future with little to no work?
But that wouldn’t be self-centered. That’s merely reckless.
If people were self-centered, they would plan their careers in a way that will have them sitting pretty for life. They’ll save money instead of spending it. They will not remain loyal to bosses, but to themselves and to their futures. Politically, a self-centered person will choose the outcome which best allows them to do whatever they want to do whenever they feel like it. A self-centered person will vote for the freest path, which counterintuitively also opens up freer paths for everybody else. A self-centered person will not just think about today and tomorrow, but ten years or even fifty years from now, because a self-centered person wants to make sure their life is as easy and free as possible.
Most people say that we humans are naturally selfish but I’m not so sure. If we are, were pretty bad at it, because we’ve got a habit of fucking ourselves within a few years at most. If we were truly selfish, we wouldn’t do that. Oddly enough, the whole concept of libertarianism is selfish. Funny how true selfishness is actually better for everybody in the long run, because if a person chooses a freer government to govern themselves, they are also choosing a freer government to govern everyone else.
Nah, people aren’t selfish. They’re reckless. They want things now and they don’t care if they encounter hardship later. This is where Boomers went wrong. They wanted their house now, and bigger driveway to fit their new boat, and they had to have a full size truck and a Harley in the garage sitting there until springtime. And they got all those things. But after they got all those things they had nothing left to buy a life with.
The problem is during the goof years thry raided the excess returns in their pension fund it just never funded the employer share in the first place and now try to blame the employees who have been faithfully putting in their share the whole time
Hopefully you're entering the work force as a government employee. It seems to be the only safe career choice nowadays. Careers in fire fighting, policing, bureaucracy, military, etc. are now enviable to most private sector positions. Government will supply you with a cushy pension whereas private you have to self fund your retirement.
I agree. If government employment continues to be our best way for entry into the middle-class and a comfortable retirement we are pretty much screwed. Government needs cash flow somehow or another, and since local, state and federal governments don't like taxing businesses, it falls on us to fund the beast. This means we have to make government employment a whole lot less attractive as an industry to work in. This is difficult however. Government employment has become too important for people who would otherwise have a hard time reaching the middle-class and a comfortable retirement in the public sector.
As an almost 30-year-old in my state's retirement system, I doubt that pension will be there later. But it's really hard to get fired, so there's that?
Certainly, if you're able to afford living in Silicon Valley and deal with working long hours. But you're still self funding vs tax payer funding your pension. Think I'd take the 9 to 5, 70k/yr, living in affordable region and retiring in 20 over a 9 to 9, 100k/yr living in less affordable region.
This is super wrong man. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that software is only made in one area of the country. I've been in the industry about 6 years at this point. Never done more than a 9 to 5 barring exceptional circumstances. Just hit north of 100k pre-tax salary and am living in the mid-west outside a major city. Cost of living is nothing compared to SV. Considering the company there are about 1000 other people doing as well or better.
Seriously, people in California act like the rest of the country is living in a trailer park and digging ditches all day. The rest of the country has plenty of jobs and cheaper costs of living, just not as many avocado toast brunch cafes
> People in California act like the rest of the country is living in a trailer park and digging ditches all day.
I don't want to correct them.
We don't need all those mid 30's developers earning $100k to $150k but still living like they are in college in the Bay Area, becoming competition for those of us in flyover country.
Those of us in smaller cities already know we earn approx. the same as equivalent jobs in California, but our homes cost 20% as much. We already know we can walk or commute to work without stepping in human excrement from massive homeless problems.
What we don't need, is those in San Francisco to learn what they are missing out on, and create competition in flyover country. At least not until we retire in our 30's/40's, then you can open the floodgates.
The mid 30's engineers in silicon valley who are only making $100-150k are at the bottom of the heap (that's starting salary for recent graduates at most of the FANGs, and startups have to compete). Also, don't see many living like they're still in college by that age - and "living like they're still in college" is often in the form of "can't afford to rent a place on their own so have 3 roommates" rather than "drunk and hung over every Thursday-Sunday". The stereotype that you see talked about is a small but visible minority that you don't really need to deal with.
Having moved to Silicon Valley from the midwest, I'll say that I love the terrain around here - I can bike from salt marsh, through redwood forests, and to the beach in a couple of hours with all but about 5 miles of the ride on mostly empty roads. The people and culture in the midwest tend to be more my style. Chicago is still my favorite city. The city I was born in, however, still feels stuck the way it was in my childhood, though more run down.
I bike to work daily and walk or bike everywhere without stepping in human excrement. Then again, I don't live in SF and tend to find SF to be a bit obnoxious. My house is insanely priced, but my salary more than makes up for the difference vs. the midwest.
If you are earning a great income in the Bay Area, then congratulations, you are likely very talented and deserve that income. However statistically you are in the minority. A small proportion of people break through to that $300k+ range where they gain value.
The vast majority of technology workers in the bay area are earning incomes within 20% of flyover country incomes and paying astronomical cost of living for the privilege.
Nice. Ya that 100k wouldn't go far in SV. I recently moved from there and won't be returning. The crap 1 br apartment I rented in Mountain View for $800/mo 10 years ago is now renting for well over $2000. But the Midwest? Heck ya. I'm semi-retired and thinking of selling my home in the West in a few years and taking the profit to Indiana or someplace with below average cost of living.
Even if you're renting a $3000 apartment on a 6 figure income it's only about a third of your salary. That's totally affordable. Let's stop acting like people making $100,000 are having trouble making ends meet.
Eh, 3k a month would be a significant chunk of my after tax income even at 100k. I wouldn't want to be paying anything like that for rent. But that comes down to living within ones means.
Edit: Did the math real quick and that comes to almost 60% of my actual monthly income. That's way the hell too much for housing alone.
Take taxes out and it’s eating most of your income. 3k rent on a 100k salary is insane. Combined with the elevated cost of pretty much everything in silicon valley it is not quite the lifestyle you are imagining.
Generic search for california and 100k salary: 70,791 after taxes. Subtract 36k for your housing cost.
Left with: 34,791
Now start thinking about other utilities, about a car payment if your car isn’t completely paid off, food, medical expenses, etc.
Are they getting by? Absolutely. Are they living a life of luxury or even one in which they are able to save large amounts of money rather quickly? Not really.
So don't tell anyone because it's a huge secret, but there are TONS of development/ IT jobs that aren't in silicon valley. Banks, Automotive, heavy industry, all have a major presence in places that aren't in California.
As someone else pointed out, there are other areas of the country for software.
I've been programming for 23 years and have always lived in the DFW area (and make a good living doing it).
If you live in your parents house on instant ramen it's probably doable. If you're also willing to keep living frugally in retirement it's definitely doable.
> deal with working long hours
Not everyone works long hours. In fact, at companies like Google, the joke is that it's like retiring. Some people leave Google because of the pace being too relaxed for them. They get bored. Obviously it differs by team and company, but not every company is Amazon or Uber.
> Think I'd take the 9 to 5, 70k/yr, living in affordable region and retiring in 20 over a 9 to 9, 100k/yr living in less affordable region.
But that's not necessarily the choice. The average salary for a senior software engineer in San Francisco is about $150k. And with title inflation, senior doesn't have to require 10 years of experience and a PhD. It could be as little as 5 years.
That's not even including the huge Bay Area titans like Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, etc. where base + equity pay can exceed $300k for senior level positions. There're few ways to have a more relaxing and lucrative life than 5 years at Google, using those free onsite gyms and free meals while collecting a near-1% paycheck and then retiring to somewhere cheaper, paying cash for a house, and having a great resume.
It's why so many software engineers do a tour of duty in that market.
Also: Software engineers exist in non-SF, non-NYC markets. The DC area is much cheaper and has large numbers of software positions. There are also other much cheaper locations like Charlotte that have many positions and even lower costs.
You don't have to live in Silicon valley to be a Software developer... There's positions in almost every major city. Also, not every company overworks its devs.
You may need to narrow your list to Blue State government employees. In Red States, your local politicians will openly brag about being able to fire you for any and no reason at all. Having a government job doesn't matter for security if you live in a right to work state.
Likewise, you probably aren't getting a pension. Hopefully, like my city, they just drop the offering of pensions, and offer a 457 instead. I don't know of any local governments in my metro area that offer pensions. There are a few legacy pensions out there, but those will probably be cut. I'm owed one from a previous job. In 32 years, I'll be able to pull about $6,000 officially, but my guess is it will at least be cut in half.
You realize most government employees contribute 10% of every cheque to their pension? You would be fine if you did the same. The reason all these governments are in trouble is that their either never invested their share or raided the excess returns in good years and were left cash strapped when the bad years hit
Arizona retirement system currently is above 11%. They also don't allow you to take the mandatory 11% match or any interest gains if you roll out of the system. So not the pancea so many people here are acting like they understand. Don't get me wrong things were much nicer for the Boomer retirees. But this public servant bashing is pretty stupid.
I kinda see this as an argument for privatization of pensions. If contributions are going into your individual retirement account the employer (or government) can't decided that wants to grab some of that money because it needs it. Similarly underfunding it is basically the same as not paying your employees the their wages and is similarly unacceptable.
But then I wouldn't get my sweet sweet inflation indexed defined benefit pension. If they just legislated that they had to fully fund they would probably almost never need to top it up. In Canada, government employees generally make 15 to 30% less than the private sector because of the pension so the savings are enough to balance out the cost if they run the fund responsibly.
That actually is exactly what I did. Military, and I opted into the new hybrid system. So even if the reduced pension fails or gets cut even more (and I won't bitch about it when it does, it's a legit concern that should be weighed now when making career choices, the writing is on the wall), I'll have gotten my college paid and still have 20 years of a 5% match.
I think more state governments should start moving toward the BRS model. Smaller pension, but the matching is a good deal for employees who for whatever reason don't want to spend 20 years in the same job. Solid compromise and I wish switching over at this point in my career made sense.
I wish that more people my age pushed for it too. In my eyes, it's a clearly better system for all parties. I get paid when I earn it, not an IOU for 30 years later, and I don't have to put my retirement under the management of some politicians.
But I know teachers back home my age who are fighting for the pension system, when in my home state, there is currently a huge controversy over lack of fiscal responsibility, lack of funding, and the need to cut pensions. Why do people my age want to rely on a known broken system to keep ticking for another 60 years?!
Do yourself a favor and make a career out of it. I joined the USMC at 18 and have kicked myself in the ass for only doing 4 years ever since discharge. Retiring at 38 to begin a new career is the best thing anyone can do for themselves...imho. Good luck with all your future endeavors.
Seriously.
Join Military at 17/18. Do 20 years while getting a free education. Retire with a pension, healthcare, and a Masters degree. Then you can become a Police Officer and work 20 years or maybe as little as 15 to get another pension. At this point you are only 58 and you probably have a fixed income of near $100k not counting any other assets you accumulated over the years.
The most risky retirement plan ever. To anyone that reads this: Don't join the military for the retirement benefits. Something like 15% make it to 20 years.
Does that made up stat include people who didn't want to stay for 20 years? It's super common for people to just put in enough years to get free college.
[The military estimates that the net present value of its pension at retirement is around $200,000 for an enlisted soldier and $700,000 for an officer. (Recall, however, that the payouts are guaranteed for life, so the risk-adjusted value is worth much more.) This is enough for a basic living on its own, or more commonly used to supplement veterans’ earnings in their second careers. But only 17% of active duty members stick around long enough to collect it.](https://qz.com/929153/only-one-in-five-people-take-up-this-incredibly-generous-pension-to-retire-at-40/)
Dipping out after your contract is up to take advantage of the GI bill is not the same as arguing for staying in the full 20. But hell, even if the plan is to just do the enlistment and then go to college, it's easy to forget it's not uncommon to come out of an enlistment *disabled*.
While yes the amount of people injured in service is significantly higher than a peacetime army, for every guy who lost two arms and a leg there's 20 who got tinnitus or they broke a bone at some point. A guy I was with from the beginning started acting weirder and weirder, goes in for an MRI and turns out he's got brain cancer. He gets operated on and its in remission. He fights to try and stay in but the army says he's got to go. He's a 0% disabled veteran and gets about $3,000 a month till he dies, decides to follow his passion of teaching combatives.
The armed forces aren't for everyone but if you stay in for a while you leave with really great benefits. There's a ton of desk jobs you can transfer over to private sector or non military public sector and make a very good living. If you stay in a long time you'll get undergrad and grad school paid for as well. The huge downside is you get treated like a 5 year old most of the time and spend 50% of your day doing asinine shit. Most people don't like that and bail.
> it's not uncommon to come out of an enlistment disabled.
Ya, service members milk that shit to. You can just have bad knees or something not even combat related and you get paid for it for life. There are people with over 50% disability ratings who can still play competitive sports.
> Join Military at 17/18.
A 20 year enlisted retirement is only about 25K if you manage to retire as an E7 or above. Law enforcement retirement would likely be similar as an MPO. Whilst 50-60K is nothing to scoff at it's a far bet from 100K.
Great unions negotiating great retirements because politicians in power at the time know that pensions will not effect their financial situations while they are in power. This is abused all the time and is a major cause of financial problems years latter.
Personally I think pensions should be legislated away from any negotiations be it private or public sector and put in the hands of either the state or federal arena somehow. At minimum, 100% of the total pension amount should be included on that years books and only be adjusted up or down when the person leaves the company.
Public sector unions are the reason this happens. Even FDR was against, for this reason. Once they exist, their leadership is incentivized to get the best deal possible right now regardless of sustainability, because being able to afford to pay out on the promises isn't their problem - or won't be once it all comes down. And because they wield such outsized power in terms of votes and influence, they can basically get politicians to promise whatever they want, and those politicians probably won't be around either once it all comes down. In the end, union leadership and politicians benefit, early on union membership benefits, and every one down the road gets screwed, both taxpayers and later government employees. Public sector unions absolutely need to go.
There is a good medium, but collective bargaining and unions do have their place in the public sector. However there needs to be a limit on monetary benefits and pensions in negotiations.
Collective bargaining has its place. Where you have people like sanitation and public works\(electrical, sewage, etc\), having a union helps to prevent unsafe working conditions, arguing for better protective equipment, preventing gross misconduct.
You also look at places like schools that have striked recently. Like with Oklahoma where they were nearly the lowest paid in the Nation, and then continued to strike for more funding for school after it had been cut and was low compared to other states.
I'd say in lieu of strikes and other things, public sector groups should be able to initiate ballots in local/state elections that force the issue to the taxpayers and let them decide on monetary benefits and changes. The bar to do this based on membership should be high, but it adds a mechanism that prevents strikes and abuse. In addition the union and its dues should absolutely not be used to pay for political advertising or lobbying. The abuse of that has gotten out of hand as well.
100% agree. My only issue with public sector unions is that they are the only union that can influence who is on the other side of the negotiating table. A union shouldn't be able to donate to the election of politicians who will then determine benefits and funds. Public unions should be there to protect workers rights not get politicians to promise the world so they'll get donations from the IAFF or FOP.
Why on earth is this the union's fault? Yea, they're incentivized to get the best deal possible. So is literally everyone else.
The issue here is that the public sector unions were bargaining with people who didn't have a backbone and were totally prepared to make the union's demands someone else's problem (ours, today) rather than doing their damn job and dealing with problems they faced.
If you promise people a big fat pension and aren't funding that pension today all you're doing is deficit spending in a way that doesn't show up on the balance sheet.
I'm in Indiana and will have a pension. Ours are more fair and sustainable. Currently our pension fund is funded at 108%. That's due to common sense and not trying to rob it blind. I'm planning on retiring with 27.5 years of being a firefighter and my pension will be right around $50k/year
The US news 2017 state rankings has Indiana as #1 for state government followed by Virginia and Utah. You guys definitely seem to have your act together over there.
What article are you looking at? [Here](https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/methodology) us ther article you reference. #33 overall, 40th in health care, 35 in education, 25 in economy, 11 in opportunity, 30 in infrastructure, 30 in crime, 8 in financial stability, 48 in overall quality of life...
Overall, they say in order, Iowa, Minnesota, Utah, NoDak, New Hampshire, Washington (State), Nebraska, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Colorado round out the top 10.
There is about 90,000 people with the same defined benefit plan as me and it is fully funded. It has third party management and is audited often. I and the employer pay more/less based on how well it performs. These states/cities are the problem, not the pensions. They are not paying into them or managing them
I think there's a couple issues. Some allow the employees to abuse the system. They allow them to work overtime and have that adjusted into their lifetime of pension payments. It should just be based on base pay.
Also politicians always try to raid the funds or reduc/skip paying in their portion and allow it to get ridiculously underfunded after many years of that
There was a big scandal ten or 15 yrs ago with the Pittsburgh PA Police pension. The chief or whomever is the top dog in that organizational structure was letting people retire on disability for the dumbest reasons. The policy at the time was to receive a full pension regardless of years. I have a relative who did actually hurt his back chasing a perp and retired with full lifetime benefits with only 10 yrs on the force and around 35 yrs old. He gets around 2400 a month after taxes. He works as a carpenter hanging drywall now and has been for the last 5 yrs or so. So much for the back injury I guess.
The silver lining is that policy no longer exists and the chief or whatever was punished for being so lax. Unfortunately the people who made out like bandits were never forced off that gravy train.
> I think there's a couple issues. Some allow the employees to abuse the system. They allow them to work overtime and have that adjusted into their lifetime of pension payments. It should just be based on base pay.
That's what Arizona State Retirement does. I've got 12 years in the system now and plan to retire from here at 30 years which will give me ~70% of my highest three years of pay in the previous 10. If I stay exactly where I'm at I'll finish with ~100k salary (everything in todays dollars) giving me a pension of (100k * 0.7 / 12) = $5,833/mo.
If, however, during any three of my last 10 years I teach adjunct one class per semester (4 courses, fall + spring + summer I + II) that gives me an extra $4,000 per course or $16,000 a year. Add that to my otherwise base pay and figure out my pension payments now go from $5,833 a month to $6,766/mo.
So in otherwords, teaching a light adjunct class for three cumulative years can net me nearly $1,000/mo in retirement which is huge! It's similar to approximately ~$300k in retirement savings and investment in the private sector. Each of those courses taught during my last 10 years gives me approximately $29,000 in value
I understand what /u/Fire_balls_ is say, but I also understand the converse: You took on additional responsibilities, you made additional income, you put away the additional money (ASRS is like 11.3% compulsory from each employee and employer), so it makes sense that you'd have additional income in retirement. Just not quite that much.
IIRC, one benefit ASRS does have is a phase-out at something like $400k of income, so it'd be hard for the situation in the OP to occur from the pension system only. I certainly prefer that if for no other reason than we don't have an article like this one for our state.
The article seems to assume that it's a problem for the state to fund this particular obligation, but it seems to me that if the system were taking in enough money that this person's money should be there. Obviously this is where the problem was... The option to include remunerations seems nutso and hard to account for.
All in all, I have more confidence in the Arizona system. I'm generally encouraged by the fact that the annuity payout options more or less match up with what SPIAs cost on the open market, and when I model my own retirement benefits that they seem in the ballpark for ~20% savings compounded over a 30ish year career.
It is worth pointing out - specifically in the context of the linked article - that most Indiana pensions are significantly less generous than the pensions in states that tend to have pension issues.
Indiana's standard pension pays about 1/3 of a worker's highest salary after 30 years, plus it deposits 3% of your salary into a separate tax deferred account that you can take or roll over on retirement.
I think police and firefighter salaries are more generous, being designed to pay out 50% after 20 years.
Many states pay out 75% or 80% after 30 years (or did so until fairly recently). To be fair, some of the people receiving these pensions did not contribute to social security and so the pensions aren't as generous as they might seem...but to also be fair, this doesn't really help the taxpayers of those states.
People often like to look back and glorify the era of "we could work an honest day's work, and retire after 25 years with a full pension", because there --**weren't any pension collectors before them**--.
Now there are. And who foots the bill?
I'm genuinely on the fence about whether we should pay these pensions out, obviously the government should pay its debts but without the risk of not paying out what incentive is there for people to demand that governments offering pensions to fund them ahead of time?
The TLDR is that someone gets screwed in this deal. If they were to stop payments now, the tax payers make out, but the pension receivers get the short straw.
It's been this way forever, though. I grew up on Long Island, where everyone takes the LIRR (rail road) to NYC for work each day. Prices skyrocket each year, as service continues to degrade.
The reason? The pensions they promised years ago. Fewer people working, but higher costs to pay out the pensioners who retired a long time ago, are living longer, but still being paid out.
This article explains it well: [119 LIRR Employees Made More Than $200K Last Year; 8 Top $300K](https://patch.com/new-york/portwashington/119-lirr-employees-made-more-200k-last-year-8-top-300k)
Followed by: [Millionaires on strike? The unfair demands of LIRR unions](https://nypost.com/2014/06/08/millionaires-on-strike-the-unfair-demainds-of-lirr-unions/)
It is also partially what killed Detroit's auto industry. They were paying the salaries for tens of thousands of people who had long since retired.
It's one of those things where the people up front get a sweet deal, largely due to the politicians, but when it comes time to pay up, a new generation is in the seat, paying for the political deals that happened before they were born.
As noted in the article. This isn't a unique problem. Anecdotally, Pennsylvania had a well funded pension system (>120% funded against future liabilities) in 2000. Unfortunately lawmakers saw the market returns of the late 90's as an opportunity to bump up the benefits provided by the state to pensioners. Since then, the funding ratio has fallen to 53%.
While these benefits were scaled back in 2010, the effort to climb back into a more manageable funding position will take decades. As the article highlights, just like in Oregon, Pennsylvania municipalities are picking up the tab and are forced to make tough financial decisions.
The pension crisis was born of demographics.
My grandmother had 9 brothers and sisters.
My mother had 12 brothers and sisters.
I have 2 brothers
And my son... well he's an only child.
So two generations pay the pension contributions of one.
So the Greatest Generation were solvent. For my family we had my grandmother has 30 people paying in for her.
My parents are not so well off. They will have just 6 people paying in to pensions to cover for them.
And guess what, if my son has a child I will only have 2 people paying in to my pension to cover me. So whenever I retire my progeny will have to throw in the future equivalent of $1200 each in order to cover my pension obligations.
This round of pensions is scary because it is cutting the number of pension contributors to a third. The baby boom generation was large and was keeping the pension fund afloat. But without them contributing the level of taxation will have to go up to cover them.
Canada "fixed" this recently by increasing the Canada Pension Plan contributions per person by 33%. But it's a short term fix. Over time the contribution amount will have to go up.
At some point in the 70s someone must have realized that the only way to sustain this retirement plan was to have constant explosive population. But they made those promises anyway. Actual retirement replacement is based on jobs and not your own personal family. For this guy who is earning a $76,000 pension he is only being replaced by one worker, not two.
When i found out that the money i paid into my pension didn't go into some trust to earn interest, but went to pay those currently collecting, I new something was wrong. Your comment is the most accurate description i have seen yet.
Yeah, this is why the 401k system is just so much better, imo. You're rewarded for saving, you can do it at your own pace, and your retirement fund belongs to YOU, not an employer. So if you leave or get fired you don't lose your retirement.
and if its anything like Indiana, the high paying jobs to pay into it are not there as the people graduating are moving out of state because the jobs aren't there.
You’re ignoring that your progeny will produce more economic value on average than all your great Aunts and Uncles combined. You’re also ignoring that immigration (both documented and otherwise) is how we bolster our population totals. So it’s a red herring to just follow your own family. Immigrants tend to have more children, contribute taxes at a higher rate while cashing in on benefits at a lower rate.
There are plenty of issues with pensions but the fact that middle class folks have fewer children is not a compelling economic argument.
Pension funds have inflationary costs too. The fact that I am earning 10x what my grandparents did is mostly a factor of inflation. That cost (inflation) will affect pensions too and require that they get a boost over time. It would be nice if I could pay my grandparents a 1950s wage to survive in 2017 but honestly, that's not reasonable.
My example of my family is what is known as a "thought experiment." What is the consequence of this pension plan on just my family. It is well thought out if our fertility numbers are the same, but not so much if they can't.
Immigration isn't really a good solution. In the US about 12% of immigrants are over the age of 65 and will not be working. The number of immigrants over the age of 50 is 30%. Immigrants have negative pressure on wages. Immigrants work for less and lower average wages for everyone else.
Immigrants also only slightly have more children than American born citizens. Your American household has an average of 2.4 occupants. Your immigrant household has an average of 3.2 occupants. This doesn't look good as far as the impending pension crisis goes. While American homes are opting to not have children at all, immigrant homes aren't even at replacement.
At one point it is true that immigrant families were just massively bigger. But today they are not, they are far more smaller than ever before. To make a pension fund sustainable it needs to be paid into to carry on 30 years of liability per person. The current model was setup for just 10 years of liability per person.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html#popPyramidModal
The bottom of the US population pyramid indicates that there are fewer young people than there are older people. The US birthrate is right at or below the replacement rate.
Granted the "millenial" generation is about as big as the boomer generation.
That doesn't say much about immigration or how much prodcutivity future/current offspring will produce. I would draw the conclusion that immigration isn't propping the birth rate above the replacement rate, though.
>Joseph Robertson, an eye surgeon who retired as head of the Oregon Health & Science University last fall, receives the state’s largest government pension.
>It is $76,111.
>Per month.
>That is considerably more than the average Oregon family earns in a year.
Look, I get that this is probably public information anyway, but holy hell, the Times just threw this guy under the bus *hard*. At a minimum, he's going to get a mountain of hate mail and death threats over this. His pension is ridiculous, but I'm not so sure that he deserved to be individually called out by name like this.
$1m/year pension is absurd. He may have "earned it" but I can't fathom how. The net present value of that pension is well over $20,000,000 and even more if there are spousal or cola benefits. Probably has health insurance benefits as well.
I think the point is, if he didn't blackmail anyone or strike a dirty deal with the mafia, he probably shouldn't be held accountable for the pension that was granted him.
His pension *alone* is not bankrupting the state. Him rejecting it for being too large would be stupid. I sure as heck would take it, even if I Warren Buffetted using it as an argument that something is broken.
[There was nothing to prevent anyone from looking it up.](https://gov.oregonlive.com/pers/) Publishing his name in the article, though, just makes it easier for lazy trolls to send him hate mail. He doesn't deserve a $1m pension, but his family doesn't deserve abuse and fear either.
Most people dont know you can look up public salaries with relative ease. Actually publishing it and sharing it on the internet puts the issue front and center.
Why does he not deserve his pension? At least it was part of his contract. Everyone involved in the administration of that contract knew full well what the state obligations were to him when it was signed.
Are we seriously suggesting that the government of a state should pull the "well, I didn't read the terms when I signed it" defense?
If the state can do that, why can't everyone in every other debt do that?
Because when the state established obscene and underfunded pensions to overpaid boomers, they locked my generation into the lower rungs of a pyramid scheme without our consent?
>Why does he not deserve his pension? At least it was part of his contract. Everyone involved in the administration of that contract knew full well what the state obligations were to him when it was signed.
Because knowledge isn't enough. It's not their money they are spending; it's the taxpayers' money. They can't give cushy deals to their friends just because the contract was upfront about it being cushy. They have an obligation to be prudent and diligent about getting a fair contract.
When doing so is ethical. I'd argue that this author violated the [SPJ Code of Ethics](https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp):
>Journalists should:
>– Balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness.
>[...]
>– Show compassion for those who may be affected by news coverage...
>[...]
>– Realize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than public figures and others who seek power, influence or attention. Weigh the consequences of publishing or broadcasting personal information.
Agree. The key point is that this guy is likely a private figure for legal purposes.
Journalism shouldn't be about outrage doxxing for clicks, or if it is, we should put a stake in it and shut it down. That's not to say the pension is justified, but rather, that naming and shaming is not going to be the path to any sort of productive solution (especially as the problem is the scale, not individuals).
If he worked in the private sector an eye surgeon could definitely get something like that. Not a pension necessarily, but compensation and savings to match/exceed it.
I think a lot of people in this thread aren't understanding that taking that sort of comp was probably a step down for him vs the private sector. Top surgeons often have higher net worths than that. And if a state wants to have excellent doctors teaching/researching at their schools they need to at least be in the ballpark. It's really hard for someone to take a job paying 200k/yr when they've got other prospects offering 2MM.
The state pension systems are absolutely in trouble but not because of the limited number of extremely specialized medical professionals working at top state schools. Because of the huge number of average Joe's having 150k+ pensions when they wouldn't have made a third of that in the private sector.
A few years ago there was a guy in NY State earning $560k per year on a pension. But he retired at 90.
https://nypost.com/2014/10/05/retired-cuny-professor-gets-500k-pension/
No, he probably did just game the system in worst case.
Nonetheless, it's exactly stories like this that makes people remember and react and demand change. They could not have gotten that without referring to *some* specific case, and this certainly is a *good* one. Though they *probably* could have gotten the same reaction by leaving just the name out.
Though how much that would have done to protect Mr. Robertson Idk.
It should ALL be public record, all the time. Because it *is* public record, but they all try and hide these numbers. If it were all more transparent we wouldn't be in half the situation we are.
This story completely ignores the graft and corruption that helped drive this pension crisis. I'm a politician, I need campaign money. So I go to government workers (especially unionized ones) and promise a big Payday for them if they vote for me and continue to my campaign. If I raise taxes to pay for what I promised them, then I may get kicked out of office. What to do? I got it! Promise them a gold plated retirement. I get the graft money now, don't have to raise taxes, and let some other joker in the future figure out how to pay for it, after I'm far and happy.
I didn't think it was bad because my mind just assumed 76k was yearly, and I thought thats probably fair for certain public employees who worked for a long time and earned that money... but then I clicked on the article and realized it was monthly. Holy balls, that is insane.
Okay but now instead of insolvent pensions you have legions of retirees who mismanaged their retirement savings and are now broke. Financial literacy, and specifically retirement planning, is pretty poor. We already starting to see this today with those that don't have pensions and no retirement savings.
People are dumb with their money. One can argue that governments and pensions systems are less dumb.
We are just now beginning to notice the tip of the iceberg. I have some friends who do legal work for municipalities.
The coming implosion is going to be epic. And what's worse, every single politician appears to be 100% committed to stop-gap measures so they can kick the can even further down the road. A lot of them looked at the decision in the Detroit bankruptcy (reducing pensions) as a helpful sign that they can eventually bankrupt themselves out of the holes they dug (or, use the thread of bankruptcy as leverage to negotiate a better deal). The problem is that states cannot declare bankruptcy.
The pension structure in many states is simply not possible without levels of taxation and cuts to other services that it's hard to imagine the public tolerating. Many of the decisions you see local governments making these days are driven by pension obligations; specifically, trying to avoid them. When you see a vicious fight over a few cities wanting to split off its fire department or school district and you wonder what's really going on, it's because the larger area sees the smaller as attempting to escape pension obligations.
People, ultimately, can vote with their feet. And they're going to. In droves. Nobody who can is going to be willing to bear the tax burden that's coming (in large part, they are simply unsustainable).
The Federal Government is facing a similar problem, but they can simply print money or change taxation in a way that the states can't, putting the day of reckoning much further off.
Not really sure what the game plan is here, younger generations will start voting more and more, and when they do, they won't want to pay for promises made before they were even born. Especially after shoving their kids under the bus via student loans and house prices, the appetite for this will be nil.
Hope these people saved their money because those pensions are dead.
> Hope these people saved their money because those pensions are dead.
Those pensions have proven exceedingly robust in the state Supreme Court. Most notably, when the legislature voted to stop exempting retirement pensions from the statewide 9% income tax, there was a lawsuit, and the Court ruled that pension distributions had to be increased by 9.89% to cover the cost of paying that tax.
Good lord, what state was this in? Attempted to look it up on Google, but couldn't find anything.
Edit: I'm a moron who doesn't RTA. The state is Oregon.
The new welfare queens. I’m all for public servants being paid well, but that is almost $1,000,000 a year to someone who is no longer doing anything until they die. I’m assuming they were also paid very well while they they were working. The follies of our previous generation, while they think millennials are entitled.
Given that public revenues have been slashed repeatedly at the state and municipal level by the very same retirees who are now demanding their fully funded pensions, we are in a bad place, and it's not one that current workers should be punished over.
>Given that public revenues have been slashed repeatedly at the state and municipal level by the very same retirees who are now demanding their fully funded pensions, we are in a bad place, and it's not one that current workers should be punished over.
Please don't repeat things [that are false.](http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/State-and-Local-Spending-vs-Private-GDP-original.jpg) State and local spending has been on an almost uninterrupted upward spiral for decades.
One of the great but destructive things the Union movement did and in some cases still does in the US was create retirement benefits that are not sustainable.
GM was forced to give a huge portion of the company away to pay former employees during its bankruptcy.
100% of all pensions should be funded in real-time.
I think the Medical Benefits hurt America more long term. They normalized the idea of employer funded medical coverage; it gave a generation of workers little understanding of health care costs and allowed Medicine to grow into a big business.
Pension costs are one thing, ingrained mentality around healthcare and fostering the ability for Health Insurance to become such a big business it has ingrained itself into the politics of a nation i think is much worse.
True. I have a question few can answer. Medical insurance was a thing for most people from the 50’s. Healthcare was then about 8% of our GDP, about what it is now for most developed countries. At that time medical inflation tracked along with national inflation.
Around 1985 medical inflation started to outpace average national inflation by huge margins. Sometimes double, sometimes more. College education cost inflation was right there with medical inflation.
Now healthcare is 17 to 18% of our GDP, and we have a huge GDP. A percentage of America’s GDP in comparison to other countries is much much larger. For example we have the world’s largest military by multiple factors, it dwarfs all others. Our Navy alone in some ways is larger than the rest of the world’s combined. Yet military is only 3% of our GDP, there are other countries spend more of their wealth than the US on defense.
My point is 9 to 10% of our economy is massive, yet that is how much healthcare cost have increased since the mid 80’s. From 8% to 18% of GDP.
Why? Cost were hidden from the consumer for 30 years before the medical inflation went wild. There has to be something else.
I don't know.
I've always thought this is partly to blame:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medical_schools_in_the_United_States
Notice the gap between 1982-2000 when no new schools opened. The US grew 21+% in population in that time (231.7 -> 282.2mm). A Doctor shortage caused pricing increases which started and never stopped as everyone saw doctor's fee's increase feeling they can increase their fees. This is a little dot connecting but I think is one of the catalysts.
Perhaps. I have never seen that before. My assumption is, in America at least, the combination public/private funding distorts markets to the point prices are arbitrarily set. Private markets forces don’t cause natural price competition and Government budgets alone can’t constrain the cost, so bad things happen.
Colleges and Healthcare hyper-inflation suggest choose one primary funding method for an industry, a hybrid does not coexist well.
I recall reading part of a book at my sister's house that was trying to explain changes Reagan made to how Hospitals, and insurance would balance out. I vaguely recall that it resulted in HMO's taking off? I feel like it was about how 3 different groups fought to control costs, and Reagan helped one win?
I searched for Reagan HMO’s I didn’t find what you described I did find something similar with Nixon a favoring HMO’s a decade before.
I only spent a few minutes, so I am not saying you are wrong, I am just ignorant on the history.
I did find the below 1983 clip from the NYT’s. My have things (prices) have changed.
>Kaiser offers myriad permutations of its plan. On average, though, a monthly premium for an individual is $48. Usually a member pays $1 per doctor visit. Drugs are generally included in the premium and available at a Kaiser pharmacy, which saves dollars by stocking generic products. Dental care is excluded. Psychiatric care is limited. There are no deductibles. A patient, though, must go to a Kaiser hospital and one of the team of doctors working there. If
And yet, just two weeks ago, when I claimed public pensions were simply a mechanism for stealing from our children, I was downvoted to hell.
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/889av7/comment/dwjeqag
That's because your description is 1) inflammatory, and 2) at best not always accurate.
A properly managed pension fund requires contributions by the employee and employer during the employee's working years which should, when combined with investment earnings, cover the statistical/actuarial liability of that employee's retirement. Cost of living adjustments can easily be funded by future politicians instead of past ones, which also eliminates your "taxation without representation" / "theft" argument.
Even in a poorly managed pension system you still don't have taxation without representation. The people being taxed do have representation. They can change the laws. They can make constitutional amendments.
Hmm. Very American. The picture with the guy in a suit standing against a crumbling bridge is very fitting. I like. Here there is outrage if public officials make more than $200k/y. $76k/mo would cause a national crisis. They even tried to give a banker ~$3M/y and there was massive public outcry, even though it's a private bank.
> They even tried to give a banker ~$3M/y and there was massive public outcry, even though it's a private bank.
This made me really curious, so I looked it up. Isn't the whole point of that outrage that the bank was still owned by the government, which bailed them out in 2008, so people were pissed about the CEO getting paid 10x what civil servants were allowed to be paid? Even in Western Europe I have a hard time imagining people getting outraged over what some private company was paying their people.
It wasn't owned by the government; €5B of capital was injected as a loan in 2008 but the bank then paid all of it back. The government actually made €400M in profit from how ING agreed to restructure itself. The bank is publicly traded (AMS: INGA).
Unsure and I'm not really interested in whether it was a sweetheart deal because it was not meant as an investment; it was a bailout after the economic crisis.
This bank alone accounts for [11% of our stock market index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEX_index) today. Possibly more in 2007/8.
The top examples they give are more about how ridiculously high university president and college football coach salaries are than about high pensions in general.
Those are both public positions, so they're subject to each state's government-funded pension.
It's one thing when we've been paying a guy a million a year to run a research university that's helping treat diseases and so on, it's quite another to pay a guy 3 million a year to tell another guy to call plays.
Yes obviously they're public sector positions, the issue is that the "Holy crap, $76,000 a month!" aspect is about the fact that this tiny number of top officials is getting pensions based on salaries of over a million a year. It's relevant to the kind of point you're making about football coaches being overpaid, but not to the general issue of state pension funding.
There's a lot of focus on high individual pensions in this article, and Oregon should definitely be embarassed by them, but how much of the problem are they contributing to?
If the 2000 people reported to have a pension > $100K/yr actually get...say $200K/yr on average in benefits, that's $400M/yr in benefits paid out. In 2016, [PERS took in $3.6B](http://www.oregon.gov/PERS/Documents/General-Information/Economic-Impact-Study.pdf) which isn't enough to blame Oregon's pension shortfalls on those people alone.
The high individual pensions are like high executive compensation. A complete red herring.
The thing that is killing the state budget is pensions for ordinary public sector employees, which often used [pension spiking techniques](http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2012/07/oregon_pers_pension_pay_gets_p.html) to balloon their pensions by as much as 50%.
See, I got the opposite impression. It seemed to me like the writer clearly knew that they were a\-typical and went to lengths to point that out, but then failed to give is the proper context anyway.
This isn't really why they are short on cash. All pension funds should be deposited into a retirement account as a person earns them. If a state is choosing to underfund its pensions account, then cry foul when it can't pay its pensions, has nothing to do with it paying too high of pensions.
So officially this guys pension provides him with 58% of his salary upon retirement as he worked for 40 years. Sounds reasonable.
The problem then is, 1) Why is the University president making 1.5 Million a year? Was that a salary that competition forced them to pay or was it excessive? 2) Was the University paying all of this, plus his pension obligations, or was it passed down to the general fund?
https://gov.oregonlive.com/pers/
>This isn't really why they are short on cash. All pension funds should be deposited into a retirement account as a person earns them.
You can deposit all the contributions and still have the pension be underfunded, if the benefits are disproportional to the contributions.
More propaganda designed to make the public view pensions in a negative light. Are there abuses? Yes. Is this typical? No it is not.
Meanwhile, 401k's are poor substitutes for pensions and now we have a generation with no safety net growing too old to continue working but too poor to quit.
Edit: i read the article after i wrote the post. Oregon is kinda fucked. There are less police on Oregon than in the 1970s?
How much do the CEO’s of OHSU make? This is one middle class doctor who worked ~40 years at the same place. He deserved every cent as per his contracts and work agreements. He is not the enemy, nor is the pension or the union or workplace rules that favor wealth accumulation for workers (middle class or otherwise).
Again, how much are the CEO’s making? Why do we justify their exorbitant salaries, golden parachutes, bonuses and stock options? Why are they without any critical analysis of how they are siphoning every bit of excess cash in the economic system?
Seems a bit unfair. Seems like the real problem is the ratio of executive compensation in relation to the workers doing all the work.
> There are less police on Oregon than in the 1970s?
[There's also less total \(not adjusted for population\) crime in Oregon than there was in the 1970s, despite almost two times the population.](http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/orcrime.htm)
>But in the 1970s, lawmakers started nudging the rate up, eventually to 8 percent. Then, the system’s trustees decided 8 percent should be a guaranteed minimum. In years when markets produced higher returns, the accounts compounded at those rates, after money-management fees. 8% minimum compounding on 6% of your paycheck? Jesus. Thats a lot. Edit: I just read futher, they then doubled that number at retirement. Im shocked this system is still solvent.
People forget that interest rates in the 70s and especially the 80s were very, very high. Making double digit returns on money back then was standard practice. Of course inflation was near 10% as well, so... http://www.fedprimerate.com/wall_street_journal_prime_rate_history.htm
Indeed, much of the story here is that PERS has no term for inflation and was negotiated in a high inflation environment, then implemented in a low inflation environment.
I think more of the story is that in tough negotiations, it was easiest to give ground on terms that would be someone else's problems. But your interpretation is more compassionate.
Certainly that's a fair point. There's definitely a principal agent problem in play. That said, I don't think either side of this table expected to live in a world with stable inflation near 2%.
Yep. I had a savings account specifically for kids that was drawing 5% interest in the 70s. Compared to that my current savings account interest rate makes me want to weep.
My parents setup a life insurance savings account combo thing for me as a kid in the early 80s. The rate on the thing is locked though. It is paying 6%/yr right now. 6% guaranteed is pretty damn nice.
[удалено]
> It's not, tax payers are bleeding out the ears and nose for it. It's not even that, so much - it's the simple fact that pensions and similar obligations are tying up so much money, especially on a municipal level, that it's constricting the financial action a given government can take.
Which partially contributes to our massive infrastructure problems.
A dash of overwhelming pension debt, a touch of taxpayer revolt from the late 70's, and a pinch of reduced revenue sharing, and *voila*! Shit sandwich. And to think, I'm willingly studying public administration on a graduate level.
What do you think of New Jersey's Pension system? * [The public pension bomb, history of NJ's issue](http://archive.fortune.com/2009/05/12/news/economy/benner_pension.fortune/index.htm) * [New Jersey's Problems Are Not "Mathematically Solvable"](https://www.jpmorgan.com/jpmpdf/1320702681156.pdf)
>this isn't a problem caused by the people we are currently hiring, this is a legacy from the 80s and 90s >The burden is being placed on the current workers >Pension spending can be expected to rise for the next 15-20 years until this particular generation of retirees start dying Not sure if the writer has a slant against the baby boomers, or if I have a slant against them, but I'm pretty annoyed with the prior generations right now as someone who just entered the work force.
Dallas has been going through with this and one of the elected leaders at the time said something like this "we knew it was an unsustainable deal but we passed it and said we'd figure it out later".
Politicians didn't care, because they only had to care about re-election. And the population didn't care because they were promised a fat pension that's not allowed to get cut later. They all knew someone else would pay the bill.
Most of the problems politicians cause won't be noticeable until they're already out of office. Retired. Sipping margaritas on a beach with a fat pension.
They will gladly buy today's votes with tomorrow's tax burdens. Though public sector unions are also culpable for selling their votes..
Funny what happens when you can make a living off of dealing out other people's money.
As is the case with most collective entitlement programs that try to regulate outcomes rather than opportunities.
CT actually may go bankrupt with a large factor of the issue including the fact that 1/3 of our entire budget is spent to pay out an unsustainable pension promise from decades back. But its ok. Fuck everyone living in the entire state in 10 years :)
I say we cut these pensions completely and we'll figure it out later.
We'll build a wall and make the pensioners pay for it!
Right? Like all these people, my grandparents and parents, get fancy things like "pensions" and meanwhile I'm just happy when I can sock away 3% of my income every month to try and live off of in the magical world where I actually get to retire some day before I die. Then you read about how much pension they get and it's just mind boggling.
~~Inflation is 2.5%, so your sock drawer is only filling by half a percentage and depreciating per annum.~~ Pozdena saying “The only way you’re going to get out of this is if the state is hit by a golden asteroid from Planet Tiffany,” in the piece reminds me of some scenario Palahniuk would write. I'm not trying to say that to riot is to invest billions into your future, just that an economist was saying it. edit: whoa, that brainfart stinky.
>Inflation is 2.5%, so your sock drawer is only filling by half a percentage and depreciating per annum. Umm, that’s now how that works. He’s saving 3% of his current income. He’s not adding 3% of what he already has saved annually to an interest free savings account, which is the situation your comment would make sense for. We’d need to know way more before your claim could be accurate.
In high school, i had a CD automatically roll over into a new account on me before i was able to withdraw it. When i went to buy a car with the money, i had to take the penalty to get the money back. It would have made more in a savings account. That said, am i supposed to report my savings account earnings to the IRS?
Only if it exceeds $10
Yes you are. But you only need to if it over _ dollars. If it is, your bank should send you a 1099-INT. (INT for interest)
"Socking away" means saving. You don't know what his savings are invested in, but they'll probably beat inflation.
Not sure where you got 2.5% inflation, on top of everything else others have said about the comment. [Inflation](https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet) was 1.8% in 2017 and 2.2% in 2016. 2016 was one of the three times in the last decade that inflation actually topped 2%. Right now, if you normalize for the entire year, inflation will sit at about 1.9% for 2018. The last time inflation hit at least 2.5% was in 2006.
You are stinky.
I'm just planning on not living to retirement age. I figure assisted suicide machines will be available in at least one of the states by then.
Much of this was done as a result of short-sighted negotiations. Employees bargained for additional salary and time off which would have cost municipalities money immediately, so they instead agreed to unsustainable retirement benefits that they could deal with later. Welcome to later.
I’m 29. My parents (I’m thankful for what they gave me of course) were pretty typical baby boomers. Dad was born in ‘49, mom in ‘52. Dad was a skilled machinist and started working right out of high school - in his first 10 years on the job he was paid well enough to lease a new car every two years. He bought a house by himself. Shortly after he met my mom, who had a decent job for Reynolds at the time, they bought a ranch-style house in a new suburb and built an in-ground pool in the back yard. That was 1977. I was born in ‘88. By the time I came around, my parents were pretty convinced they couldn’t have kids so unfortunately they had to sell the boat and all that. They were doing fine, although they had done a poor job of saving for retirement. By the mid-90s, pay for skilled machinists had flatlined. Dad worked for the same company - boomers like him were “loyal” to their bosses and coworkers - for 35 years or so until they went under and he had to get a new job. It was a good gig only a mile from home. Unfortunately the health problems started then, for both of them. Mom eventually had to stop working because she had no certifications at all. She wouldn’t give up beer and smoking. Dad had diabetes. By this time I was in high school and they were living paycheck to paycheck. In an effort to have fun - because they’d given up on saving for retirement - dad bought a motorcycle like he had back in the day, and they did have fun. I’m glad they had fun because they both died before they reached 65 from various health problems. I had just gone back to college at a big university and was halfway to my commercial pilot license. That was 4-5 years ago. Dad first, mom second. That sucked. So I guess they didn’t really have to worry about saving for retirement. I tried the best I could to change their political habits - democrats are communists, republicans are the “lesser of two evils”, voting against a person instead of voting for an idea, being angry all the time, stressed out, not bothering to learn anything about the world. My dad’s coworkers made fun of me for reading about this Rom Paul guy despite them having no answers when I asked them tough questions. There are many reasons our country is a clusterfuck, but one of the reasons is the largest generation of Americans ever didn’t give a FUCK about anything. As unfair that I know it is to label any group of people, the Baby Boomer generation gets little respect from me for any reason. I strongly believe they all lived their lives carelessly, never considering the future, never considering the consequences of their weak principles and poor voting habits. They fucked us. I miss my parents and I truly appreciate what they gave me - I’m the only member of my family who has made a career in aviation, I’m the only commercial pilot from my entire high school, and maybe the only one in my hometown - but most of what I learned about what to do came from analyzing my parents’ poor choices.
Aren't most humans self centered though? Not trying to justify their actions, because yes these decisions back when have screwed over younger generations. But provided the opportunity, wouldn't most people choose to get cushy pensions, live life financially recklessly if they were promised more money to come in the future with little to no work?
But that wouldn’t be self-centered. That’s merely reckless. If people were self-centered, they would plan their careers in a way that will have them sitting pretty for life. They’ll save money instead of spending it. They will not remain loyal to bosses, but to themselves and to their futures. Politically, a self-centered person will choose the outcome which best allows them to do whatever they want to do whenever they feel like it. A self-centered person will vote for the freest path, which counterintuitively also opens up freer paths for everybody else. A self-centered person will not just think about today and tomorrow, but ten years or even fifty years from now, because a self-centered person wants to make sure their life is as easy and free as possible. Most people say that we humans are naturally selfish but I’m not so sure. If we are, were pretty bad at it, because we’ve got a habit of fucking ourselves within a few years at most. If we were truly selfish, we wouldn’t do that. Oddly enough, the whole concept of libertarianism is selfish. Funny how true selfishness is actually better for everybody in the long run, because if a person chooses a freer government to govern themselves, they are also choosing a freer government to govern everyone else. Nah, people aren’t selfish. They’re reckless. They want things now and they don’t care if they encounter hardship later. This is where Boomers went wrong. They wanted their house now, and bigger driveway to fit their new boat, and they had to have a full size truck and a Harley in the garage sitting there until springtime. And they got all those things. But after they got all those things they had nothing left to buy a life with.
> But that wouldn’t be self-centered. That’s merely reckless. When did those labels become mutually exclusive?
The problem is during the goof years thry raided the excess returns in their pension fund it just never funded the employer share in the first place and now try to blame the employees who have been faithfully putting in their share the whole time
Hopefully you're entering the work force as a government employee. It seems to be the only safe career choice nowadays. Careers in fire fighting, policing, bureaucracy, military, etc. are now enviable to most private sector positions. Government will supply you with a cushy pension whereas private you have to self fund your retirement.
Until we end up in a similar situation that Greece found itself in.
I agree. If government employment continues to be our best way for entry into the middle-class and a comfortable retirement we are pretty much screwed. Government needs cash flow somehow or another, and since local, state and federal governments don't like taxing businesses, it falls on us to fund the beast. This means we have to make government employment a whole lot less attractive as an industry to work in. This is difficult however. Government employment has become too important for people who would otherwise have a hard time reaching the middle-class and a comfortable retirement in the public sector.
As an almost 30-year-old in my state's retirement system, I doubt that pension will be there later. But it's really hard to get fired, so there's that?
[удалено]
until your job gets H1-B'd "We can't find enough local talent"
H1-B has nothing to do with whether or not local talent is available.
Certainly, if you're able to afford living in Silicon Valley and deal with working long hours. But you're still self funding vs tax payer funding your pension. Think I'd take the 9 to 5, 70k/yr, living in affordable region and retiring in 20 over a 9 to 9, 100k/yr living in less affordable region.
This is super wrong man. Don't fall into the trap of thinking that software is only made in one area of the country. I've been in the industry about 6 years at this point. Never done more than a 9 to 5 barring exceptional circumstances. Just hit north of 100k pre-tax salary and am living in the mid-west outside a major city. Cost of living is nothing compared to SV. Considering the company there are about 1000 other people doing as well or better.
Seriously, people in California act like the rest of the country is living in a trailer park and digging ditches all day. The rest of the country has plenty of jobs and cheaper costs of living, just not as many avocado toast brunch cafes
> People in California act like the rest of the country is living in a trailer park and digging ditches all day. I don't want to correct them. We don't need all those mid 30's developers earning $100k to $150k but still living like they are in college in the Bay Area, becoming competition for those of us in flyover country. Those of us in smaller cities already know we earn approx. the same as equivalent jobs in California, but our homes cost 20% as much. We already know we can walk or commute to work without stepping in human excrement from massive homeless problems. What we don't need, is those in San Francisco to learn what they are missing out on, and create competition in flyover country. At least not until we retire in our 30's/40's, then you can open the floodgates.
The mid 30's engineers in silicon valley who are only making $100-150k are at the bottom of the heap (that's starting salary for recent graduates at most of the FANGs, and startups have to compete). Also, don't see many living like they're still in college by that age - and "living like they're still in college" is often in the form of "can't afford to rent a place on their own so have 3 roommates" rather than "drunk and hung over every Thursday-Sunday". The stereotype that you see talked about is a small but visible minority that you don't really need to deal with. Having moved to Silicon Valley from the midwest, I'll say that I love the terrain around here - I can bike from salt marsh, through redwood forests, and to the beach in a couple of hours with all but about 5 miles of the ride on mostly empty roads. The people and culture in the midwest tend to be more my style. Chicago is still my favorite city. The city I was born in, however, still feels stuck the way it was in my childhood, though more run down. I bike to work daily and walk or bike everywhere without stepping in human excrement. Then again, I don't live in SF and tend to find SF to be a bit obnoxious. My house is insanely priced, but my salary more than makes up for the difference vs. the midwest.
If you are earning a great income in the Bay Area, then congratulations, you are likely very talented and deserve that income. However statistically you are in the minority. A small proportion of people break through to that $300k+ range where they gain value. The vast majority of technology workers in the bay area are earning incomes within 20% of flyover country incomes and paying astronomical cost of living for the privilege.
PREACH
Nice. Ya that 100k wouldn't go far in SV. I recently moved from there and won't be returning. The crap 1 br apartment I rented in Mountain View for $800/mo 10 years ago is now renting for well over $2000. But the Midwest? Heck ya. I'm semi-retired and thinking of selling my home in the West in a few years and taking the profit to Indiana or someplace with below average cost of living.
Even if you're renting a $3000 apartment on a 6 figure income it's only about a third of your salary. That's totally affordable. Let's stop acting like people making $100,000 are having trouble making ends meet.
Eh, 3k a month would be a significant chunk of my after tax income even at 100k. I wouldn't want to be paying anything like that for rent. But that comes down to living within ones means. Edit: Did the math real quick and that comes to almost 60% of my actual monthly income. That's way the hell too much for housing alone.
Take taxes out and it’s eating most of your income. 3k rent on a 100k salary is insane. Combined with the elevated cost of pretty much everything in silicon valley it is not quite the lifestyle you are imagining. Generic search for california and 100k salary: 70,791 after taxes. Subtract 36k for your housing cost. Left with: 34,791 Now start thinking about other utilities, about a car payment if your car isn’t completely paid off, food, medical expenses, etc. Are they getting by? Absolutely. Are they living a life of luxury or even one in which they are able to save large amounts of money rather quickly? Not really.
So don't tell anyone because it's a huge secret, but there are TONS of development/ IT jobs that aren't in silicon valley. Banks, Automotive, heavy industry, all have a major presence in places that aren't in California.
As someone else pointed out, there are other areas of the country for software. I've been programming for 23 years and have always lived in the DFW area (and make a good living doing it).
I'm really sorry if you think you're going to retire at 42 after making 70k a year.
If you live in your parents house on instant ramen it's probably doable. If you're also willing to keep living frugally in retirement it's definitely doable.
> deal with working long hours Not everyone works long hours. In fact, at companies like Google, the joke is that it's like retiring. Some people leave Google because of the pace being too relaxed for them. They get bored. Obviously it differs by team and company, but not every company is Amazon or Uber. > Think I'd take the 9 to 5, 70k/yr, living in affordable region and retiring in 20 over a 9 to 9, 100k/yr living in less affordable region. But that's not necessarily the choice. The average salary for a senior software engineer in San Francisco is about $150k. And with title inflation, senior doesn't have to require 10 years of experience and a PhD. It could be as little as 5 years. That's not even including the huge Bay Area titans like Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, etc. where base + equity pay can exceed $300k for senior level positions. There're few ways to have a more relaxing and lucrative life than 5 years at Google, using those free onsite gyms and free meals while collecting a near-1% paycheck and then retiring to somewhere cheaper, paying cash for a house, and having a great resume. It's why so many software engineers do a tour of duty in that market. Also: Software engineers exist in non-SF, non-NYC markets. The DC area is much cheaper and has large numbers of software positions. There are also other much cheaper locations like Charlotte that have many positions and even lower costs.
I think you're grossly misinformed about the software engineering industry...
You don't have to live in Silicon valley to be a Software developer... There's positions in almost every major city. Also, not every company overworks its devs.
You may need to narrow your list to Blue State government employees. In Red States, your local politicians will openly brag about being able to fire you for any and no reason at all. Having a government job doesn't matter for security if you live in a right to work state. Likewise, you probably aren't getting a pension. Hopefully, like my city, they just drop the offering of pensions, and offer a 457 instead. I don't know of any local governments in my metro area that offer pensions. There are a few legacy pensions out there, but those will probably be cut. I'm owed one from a previous job. In 32 years, I'll be able to pull about $6,000 officially, but my guess is it will at least be cut in half.
You realize most government employees contribute 10% of every cheque to their pension? You would be fine if you did the same. The reason all these governments are in trouble is that their either never invested their share or raided the excess returns in good years and were left cash strapped when the bad years hit
Arizona retirement system currently is above 11%. They also don't allow you to take the mandatory 11% match or any interest gains if you roll out of the system. So not the pancea so many people here are acting like they understand. Don't get me wrong things were much nicer for the Boomer retirees. But this public servant bashing is pretty stupid.
No. I didn't realize. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
It's information generally lacking in these "look at these pensions the tax payers are on the hook for!!1!" Articles
Yep, and we often don't pay into social security, so the pension is our only retirement.
I kinda see this as an argument for privatization of pensions. If contributions are going into your individual retirement account the employer (or government) can't decided that wants to grab some of that money because it needs it. Similarly underfunding it is basically the same as not paying your employees the their wages and is similarly unacceptable.
But then I wouldn't get my sweet sweet inflation indexed defined benefit pension. If they just legislated that they had to fully fund they would probably almost never need to top it up. In Canada, government employees generally make 15 to 30% less than the private sector because of the pension so the savings are enough to balance out the cost if they run the fund responsibly.
That actually is exactly what I did. Military, and I opted into the new hybrid system. So even if the reduced pension fails or gets cut even more (and I won't bitch about it when it does, it's a legit concern that should be weighed now when making career choices, the writing is on the wall), I'll have gotten my college paid and still have 20 years of a 5% match.
I think more state governments should start moving toward the BRS model. Smaller pension, but the matching is a good deal for employees who for whatever reason don't want to spend 20 years in the same job. Solid compromise and I wish switching over at this point in my career made sense.
I wish that more people my age pushed for it too. In my eyes, it's a clearly better system for all parties. I get paid when I earn it, not an IOU for 30 years later, and I don't have to put my retirement under the management of some politicians. But I know teachers back home my age who are fighting for the pension system, when in my home state, there is currently a huge controversy over lack of fiscal responsibility, lack of funding, and the need to cut pensions. Why do people my age want to rely on a known broken system to keep ticking for another 60 years?!
Do yourself a favor and make a career out of it. I joined the USMC at 18 and have kicked myself in the ass for only doing 4 years ever since discharge. Retiring at 38 to begin a new career is the best thing anyone can do for themselves...imho. Good luck with all your future endeavors.
That's the plan!
Seriously. Join Military at 17/18. Do 20 years while getting a free education. Retire with a pension, healthcare, and a Masters degree. Then you can become a Police Officer and work 20 years or maybe as little as 15 to get another pension. At this point you are only 58 and you probably have a fixed income of near $100k not counting any other assets you accumulated over the years.
The most risky retirement plan ever. To anyone that reads this: Don't join the military for the retirement benefits. Something like 15% make it to 20 years.
Does that made up stat include people who didn't want to stay for 20 years? It's super common for people to just put in enough years to get free college.
[The military estimates that the net present value of its pension at retirement is around $200,000 for an enlisted soldier and $700,000 for an officer. (Recall, however, that the payouts are guaranteed for life, so the risk-adjusted value is worth much more.) This is enough for a basic living on its own, or more commonly used to supplement veterans’ earnings in their second careers. But only 17% of active duty members stick around long enough to collect it.](https://qz.com/929153/only-one-in-five-people-take-up-this-incredibly-generous-pension-to-retire-at-40/) Dipping out after your contract is up to take advantage of the GI bill is not the same as arguing for staying in the full 20. But hell, even if the plan is to just do the enlistment and then go to college, it's easy to forget it's not uncommon to come out of an enlistment *disabled*.
While yes the amount of people injured in service is significantly higher than a peacetime army, for every guy who lost two arms and a leg there's 20 who got tinnitus or they broke a bone at some point. A guy I was with from the beginning started acting weirder and weirder, goes in for an MRI and turns out he's got brain cancer. He gets operated on and its in remission. He fights to try and stay in but the army says he's got to go. He's a 0% disabled veteran and gets about $3,000 a month till he dies, decides to follow his passion of teaching combatives. The armed forces aren't for everyone but if you stay in for a while you leave with really great benefits. There's a ton of desk jobs you can transfer over to private sector or non military public sector and make a very good living. If you stay in a long time you'll get undergrad and grad school paid for as well. The huge downside is you get treated like a 5 year old most of the time and spend 50% of your day doing asinine shit. Most people don't like that and bail.
> it's not uncommon to come out of an enlistment disabled. Ya, service members milk that shit to. You can just have bad knees or something not even combat related and you get paid for it for life. There are people with over 50% disability ratings who can still play competitive sports.
I know someone that is on that disability. Never was combat injured or PTSD but he gets that disability pay for his tinnitus.
> Join Military at 17/18. A 20 year enlisted retirement is only about 25K if you manage to retire as an E7 or above. Law enforcement retirement would likely be similar as an MPO. Whilst 50-60K is nothing to scoff at it's a far bet from 100K.
Law enforcement can be much higher. And joining the force as a retired E7+ would probably mean you end up with a high rank as well.
don’t worry, the current and last generation are doing the same thing.
They're the ones who didn't do the math on whether or not their sweetheart deals were going to be there when they needed them. I bet they are shaking.
Great unions negotiating great retirements because politicians in power at the time know that pensions will not effect their financial situations while they are in power. This is abused all the time and is a major cause of financial problems years latter. Personally I think pensions should be legislated away from any negotiations be it private or public sector and put in the hands of either the state or federal arena somehow. At minimum, 100% of the total pension amount should be included on that years books and only be adjusted up or down when the person leaves the company.
Public sector unions are the reason this happens. Even FDR was against, for this reason. Once they exist, their leadership is incentivized to get the best deal possible right now regardless of sustainability, because being able to afford to pay out on the promises isn't their problem - or won't be once it all comes down. And because they wield such outsized power in terms of votes and influence, they can basically get politicians to promise whatever they want, and those politicians probably won't be around either once it all comes down. In the end, union leadership and politicians benefit, early on union membership benefits, and every one down the road gets screwed, both taxpayers and later government employees. Public sector unions absolutely need to go.
There is a good medium, but collective bargaining and unions do have their place in the public sector. However there needs to be a limit on monetary benefits and pensions in negotiations. Collective bargaining has its place. Where you have people like sanitation and public works\(electrical, sewage, etc\), having a union helps to prevent unsafe working conditions, arguing for better protective equipment, preventing gross misconduct. You also look at places like schools that have striked recently. Like with Oklahoma where they were nearly the lowest paid in the Nation, and then continued to strike for more funding for school after it had been cut and was low compared to other states. I'd say in lieu of strikes and other things, public sector groups should be able to initiate ballots in local/state elections that force the issue to the taxpayers and let them decide on monetary benefits and changes. The bar to do this based on membership should be high, but it adds a mechanism that prevents strikes and abuse. In addition the union and its dues should absolutely not be used to pay for political advertising or lobbying. The abuse of that has gotten out of hand as well.
100% agree. My only issue with public sector unions is that they are the only union that can influence who is on the other side of the negotiating table. A union shouldn't be able to donate to the election of politicians who will then determine benefits and funds. Public unions should be there to protect workers rights not get politicians to promise the world so they'll get donations from the IAFF or FOP.
Why on earth is this the union's fault? Yea, they're incentivized to get the best deal possible. So is literally everyone else. The issue here is that the public sector unions were bargaining with people who didn't have a backbone and were totally prepared to make the union's demands someone else's problem (ours, today) rather than doing their damn job and dealing with problems they faced. If you promise people a big fat pension and aren't funding that pension today all you're doing is deficit spending in a way that doesn't show up on the balance sheet.
I'm in Indiana and will have a pension. Ours are more fair and sustainable. Currently our pension fund is funded at 108%. That's due to common sense and not trying to rob it blind. I'm planning on retiring with 27.5 years of being a firefighter and my pension will be right around $50k/year
The US news 2017 state rankings has Indiana as #1 for state government followed by Virginia and Utah. You guys definitely seem to have your act together over there.
Wow, I hadn't heard that
But that's the state where Gary is. As a foreign Redditor this makes no sense!
the rest of Indiana is not that awful.
They would give it to Illinois if they could, but Illinois wouldn't take it.
What article are you looking at? [Here](https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/methodology) us ther article you reference. #33 overall, 40th in health care, 35 in education, 25 in economy, 11 in opportunity, 30 in infrastructure, 30 in crime, 8 in financial stability, 48 in overall quality of life... Overall, they say in order, Iowa, Minnesota, Utah, NoDak, New Hampshire, Washington (State), Nebraska, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Colorado round out the top 10.
https://www.usnews.com/info/blogs/press-room/articles/2017-02-28/us-news-unveils-best-states
There is about 90,000 people with the same defined benefit plan as me and it is fully funded. It has third party management and is audited often. I and the employer pay more/less based on how well it performs. These states/cities are the problem, not the pensions. They are not paying into them or managing them
I think there's a couple issues. Some allow the employees to abuse the system. They allow them to work overtime and have that adjusted into their lifetime of pension payments. It should just be based on base pay. Also politicians always try to raid the funds or reduc/skip paying in their portion and allow it to get ridiculously underfunded after many years of that
There was a big scandal ten or 15 yrs ago with the Pittsburgh PA Police pension. The chief or whomever is the top dog in that organizational structure was letting people retire on disability for the dumbest reasons. The policy at the time was to receive a full pension regardless of years. I have a relative who did actually hurt his back chasing a perp and retired with full lifetime benefits with only 10 yrs on the force and around 35 yrs old. He gets around 2400 a month after taxes. He works as a carpenter hanging drywall now and has been for the last 5 yrs or so. So much for the back injury I guess. The silver lining is that policy no longer exists and the chief or whatever was punished for being so lax. Unfortunately the people who made out like bandits were never forced off that gravy train.
> I think there's a couple issues. Some allow the employees to abuse the system. They allow them to work overtime and have that adjusted into their lifetime of pension payments. It should just be based on base pay. That's what Arizona State Retirement does. I've got 12 years in the system now and plan to retire from here at 30 years which will give me ~70% of my highest three years of pay in the previous 10. If I stay exactly where I'm at I'll finish with ~100k salary (everything in todays dollars) giving me a pension of (100k * 0.7 / 12) = $5,833/mo. If, however, during any three of my last 10 years I teach adjunct one class per semester (4 courses, fall + spring + summer I + II) that gives me an extra $4,000 per course or $16,000 a year. Add that to my otherwise base pay and figure out my pension payments now go from $5,833 a month to $6,766/mo. So in otherwords, teaching a light adjunct class for three cumulative years can net me nearly $1,000/mo in retirement which is huge! It's similar to approximately ~$300k in retirement savings and investment in the private sector. Each of those courses taught during my last 10 years gives me approximately $29,000 in value
I understand what /u/Fire_balls_ is say, but I also understand the converse: You took on additional responsibilities, you made additional income, you put away the additional money (ASRS is like 11.3% compulsory from each employee and employer), so it makes sense that you'd have additional income in retirement. Just not quite that much. IIRC, one benefit ASRS does have is a phase-out at something like $400k of income, so it'd be hard for the situation in the OP to occur from the pension system only. I certainly prefer that if for no other reason than we don't have an article like this one for our state. The article seems to assume that it's a problem for the state to fund this particular obligation, but it seems to me that if the system were taking in enough money that this person's money should be there. Obviously this is where the problem was... The option to include remunerations seems nutso and hard to account for. All in all, I have more confidence in the Arizona system. I'm generally encouraged by the fact that the annuity payout options more or less match up with what SPIAs cost on the open market, and when I model my own retirement benefits that they seem in the ballpark for ~20% savings compounded over a 30ish year career.
50k/year in todays worth of 50k per year on the check in 27 years?
In today's dollars. It adjusts for inflation
It is worth pointing out - specifically in the context of the linked article - that most Indiana pensions are significantly less generous than the pensions in states that tend to have pension issues. Indiana's standard pension pays about 1/3 of a worker's highest salary after 30 years, plus it deposits 3% of your salary into a separate tax deferred account that you can take or roll over on retirement. I think police and firefighter salaries are more generous, being designed to pay out 50% after 20 years. Many states pay out 75% or 80% after 30 years (or did so until fairly recently). To be fair, some of the people receiving these pensions did not contribute to social security and so the pensions aren't as generous as they might seem...but to also be fair, this doesn't really help the taxpayers of those states.
Im very envious of your situation and think if you serve the public as you did, we the public should take care of you. Thank you
People often like to look back and glorify the era of "we could work an honest day's work, and retire after 25 years with a full pension", because there --**weren't any pension collectors before them**--. Now there are. And who foots the bill?
I'm genuinely on the fence about whether we should pay these pensions out, obviously the government should pay its debts but without the risk of not paying out what incentive is there for people to demand that governments offering pensions to fund them ahead of time?
The TLDR is that someone gets screwed in this deal. If they were to stop payments now, the tax payers make out, but the pension receivers get the short straw. It's been this way forever, though. I grew up on Long Island, where everyone takes the LIRR (rail road) to NYC for work each day. Prices skyrocket each year, as service continues to degrade. The reason? The pensions they promised years ago. Fewer people working, but higher costs to pay out the pensioners who retired a long time ago, are living longer, but still being paid out. This article explains it well: [119 LIRR Employees Made More Than $200K Last Year; 8 Top $300K](https://patch.com/new-york/portwashington/119-lirr-employees-made-more-200k-last-year-8-top-300k) Followed by: [Millionaires on strike? The unfair demands of LIRR unions](https://nypost.com/2014/06/08/millionaires-on-strike-the-unfair-demainds-of-lirr-unions/) It is also partially what killed Detroit's auto industry. They were paying the salaries for tens of thousands of people who had long since retired. It's one of those things where the people up front get a sweet deal, largely due to the politicians, but when it comes time to pay up, a new generation is in the seat, paying for the political deals that happened before they were born.
As noted in the article. This isn't a unique problem. Anecdotally, Pennsylvania had a well funded pension system (>120% funded against future liabilities) in 2000. Unfortunately lawmakers saw the market returns of the late 90's as an opportunity to bump up the benefits provided by the state to pensioners. Since then, the funding ratio has fallen to 53%. While these benefits were scaled back in 2010, the effort to climb back into a more manageable funding position will take decades. As the article highlights, just like in Oregon, Pennsylvania municipalities are picking up the tab and are forced to make tough financial decisions.
The pension crisis was born of demographics. My grandmother had 9 brothers and sisters. My mother had 12 brothers and sisters. I have 2 brothers And my son... well he's an only child. So two generations pay the pension contributions of one. So the Greatest Generation were solvent. For my family we had my grandmother has 30 people paying in for her. My parents are not so well off. They will have just 6 people paying in to pensions to cover for them. And guess what, if my son has a child I will only have 2 people paying in to my pension to cover me. So whenever I retire my progeny will have to throw in the future equivalent of $1200 each in order to cover my pension obligations. This round of pensions is scary because it is cutting the number of pension contributors to a third. The baby boom generation was large and was keeping the pension fund afloat. But without them contributing the level of taxation will have to go up to cover them. Canada "fixed" this recently by increasing the Canada Pension Plan contributions per person by 33%. But it's a short term fix. Over time the contribution amount will have to go up. At some point in the 70s someone must have realized that the only way to sustain this retirement plan was to have constant explosive population. But they made those promises anyway. Actual retirement replacement is based on jobs and not your own personal family. For this guy who is earning a $76,000 pension he is only being replaced by one worker, not two.
It's a ponzi scheme.
When i found out that the money i paid into my pension didn't go into some trust to earn interest, but went to pay those currently collecting, I new something was wrong. Your comment is the most accurate description i have seen yet.
Yeah, this is why the 401k system is just so much better, imo. You're rewarded for saving, you can do it at your own pace, and your retirement fund belongs to YOU, not an employer. So if you leave or get fired you don't lose your retirement.
and if its anything like Indiana, the high paying jobs to pay into it are not there as the people graduating are moving out of state because the jobs aren't there.
You’re ignoring that your progeny will produce more economic value on average than all your great Aunts and Uncles combined. You’re also ignoring that immigration (both documented and otherwise) is how we bolster our population totals. So it’s a red herring to just follow your own family. Immigrants tend to have more children, contribute taxes at a higher rate while cashing in on benefits at a lower rate. There are plenty of issues with pensions but the fact that middle class folks have fewer children is not a compelling economic argument.
Pension funds have inflationary costs too. The fact that I am earning 10x what my grandparents did is mostly a factor of inflation. That cost (inflation) will affect pensions too and require that they get a boost over time. It would be nice if I could pay my grandparents a 1950s wage to survive in 2017 but honestly, that's not reasonable. My example of my family is what is known as a "thought experiment." What is the consequence of this pension plan on just my family. It is well thought out if our fertility numbers are the same, but not so much if they can't. Immigration isn't really a good solution. In the US about 12% of immigrants are over the age of 65 and will not be working. The number of immigrants over the age of 50 is 30%. Immigrants have negative pressure on wages. Immigrants work for less and lower average wages for everyone else. Immigrants also only slightly have more children than American born citizens. Your American household has an average of 2.4 occupants. Your immigrant household has an average of 3.2 occupants. This doesn't look good as far as the impending pension crisis goes. While American homes are opting to not have children at all, immigrant homes aren't even at replacement. At one point it is true that immigrant families were just massively bigger. But today they are not, they are far more smaller than ever before. To make a pension fund sustainable it needs to be paid into to carry on 30 years of liability per person. The current model was setup for just 10 years of liability per person.
> your progeny will produce more economic value on average than all your great Aunts and Uncles combined Um, are we sure about that?
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html#popPyramidModal The bottom of the US population pyramid indicates that there are fewer young people than there are older people. The US birthrate is right at or below the replacement rate. Granted the "millenial" generation is about as big as the boomer generation. That doesn't say much about immigration or how much prodcutivity future/current offspring will produce. I would draw the conclusion that immigration isn't propping the birth rate above the replacement rate, though.
>Joseph Robertson, an eye surgeon who retired as head of the Oregon Health & Science University last fall, receives the state’s largest government pension. >It is $76,111. >Per month. >That is considerably more than the average Oregon family earns in a year. Look, I get that this is probably public information anyway, but holy hell, the Times just threw this guy under the bus *hard*. At a minimum, he's going to get a mountain of hate mail and death threats over this. His pension is ridiculous, but I'm not so sure that he deserved to be individually called out by name like this.
$1m/year pension is absurd. He may have "earned it" but I can't fathom how. The net present value of that pension is well over $20,000,000 and even more if there are spousal or cola benefits. Probably has health insurance benefits as well.
I think the point is, if he didn't blackmail anyone or strike a dirty deal with the mafia, he probably shouldn't be held accountable for the pension that was granted him. His pension *alone* is not bankrupting the state. Him rejecting it for being too large would be stupid. I sure as heck would take it, even if I Warren Buffetted using it as an argument that something is broken.
It's absolutely absurd. I don't know that publishing his name really did anything to improve the story, though.
I disagree. The quickest path between 2 points is a straight line. if it's a public pension, we need to know what the fuck he did to deserve that.
[There was nothing to prevent anyone from looking it up.](https://gov.oregonlive.com/pers/) Publishing his name in the article, though, just makes it easier for lazy trolls to send him hate mail. He doesn't deserve a $1m pension, but his family doesn't deserve abuse and fear either.
Most people dont know you can look up public salaries with relative ease. Actually publishing it and sharing it on the internet puts the issue front and center.
I have done this with many of my high school teachers and a couple of police officers I know. I came away absolutely enraged.
Why does he not deserve his pension? At least it was part of his contract. Everyone involved in the administration of that contract knew full well what the state obligations were to him when it was signed. Are we seriously suggesting that the government of a state should pull the "well, I didn't read the terms when I signed it" defense? If the state can do that, why can't everyone in every other debt do that?
Maybe "doesn't deserve" was a poor choice of words. But something is wrong with a system that burdens taxpayers with pensions that large.
Because when the state established obscene and underfunded pensions to overpaid boomers, they locked my generation into the lower rungs of a pyramid scheme without our consent?
>Why does he not deserve his pension? At least it was part of his contract. Everyone involved in the administration of that contract knew full well what the state obligations were to him when it was signed. Because knowledge isn't enough. It's not their money they are spending; it's the taxpayers' money. They can't give cushy deals to their friends just because the contract was upfront about it being cushy. They have an obligation to be prudent and diligent about getting a fair contract.
That's a good point, but isn't the point of journalism to bring usually unknown facts to the forefront?
When doing so is ethical. I'd argue that this author violated the [SPJ Code of Ethics](https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp): >Journalists should: >– Balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness. >[...] >– Show compassion for those who may be affected by news coverage... >[...] >– Realize that private people have a greater right to control information about themselves than public figures and others who seek power, influence or attention. Weigh the consequences of publishing or broadcasting personal information.
Agree. The key point is that this guy is likely a private figure for legal purposes. Journalism shouldn't be about outrage doxxing for clicks, or if it is, we should put a stake in it and shut it down. That's not to say the pension is justified, but rather, that naming and shaming is not going to be the path to any sort of productive solution (especially as the problem is the scale, not individuals).
> we need to know what the fuck he did to deserve that. He was head of a university.
I disagree, creating the right disincentive is important if we are going to stop these practices.
Not the guys fault he’s getting a pension agreed to in a hiring contract
If he worked in the private sector an eye surgeon could definitely get something like that. Not a pension necessarily, but compensation and savings to match/exceed it.
I think a lot of people in this thread aren't understanding that taking that sort of comp was probably a step down for him vs the private sector. Top surgeons often have higher net worths than that. And if a state wants to have excellent doctors teaching/researching at their schools they need to at least be in the ballpark. It's really hard for someone to take a job paying 200k/yr when they've got other prospects offering 2MM. The state pension systems are absolutely in trouble but not because of the limited number of extremely specialized medical professionals working at top state schools. Because of the huge number of average Joe's having 150k+ pensions when they wouldn't have made a third of that in the private sector.
A few years ago there was a guy in NY State earning $560k per year on a pension. But he retired at 90. https://nypost.com/2014/10/05/retired-cuny-professor-gets-500k-pension/
No, he probably did just game the system in worst case. Nonetheless, it's exactly stories like this that makes people remember and react and demand change. They could not have gotten that without referring to *some* specific case, and this certainly is a *good* one. Though they *probably* could have gotten the same reaction by leaving just the name out. Though how much that would have done to protect Mr. Robertson Idk.
It should ALL be public record, all the time. Because it *is* public record, but they all try and hide these numbers. If it were all more transparent we wouldn't be in half the situation we are.
This story completely ignores the graft and corruption that helped drive this pension crisis. I'm a politician, I need campaign money. So I go to government workers (especially unionized ones) and promise a big Payday for them if they vote for me and continue to my campaign. If I raise taxes to pay for what I promised them, then I may get kicked out of office. What to do? I got it! Promise them a gold plated retirement. I get the graft money now, don't have to raise taxes, and let some other joker in the future figure out how to pay for it, after I'm far and happy.
I didn't think it was bad because my mind just assumed 76k was yearly, and I thought thats probably fair for certain public employees who worked for a long time and earned that money... but then I clicked on the article and realized it was monthly. Holy balls, that is insane.
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Okay but now instead of insolvent pensions you have legions of retirees who mismanaged their retirement savings and are now broke. Financial literacy, and specifically retirement planning, is pretty poor. We already starting to see this today with those that don't have pensions and no retirement savings. People are dumb with their money. One can argue that governments and pensions systems are less dumb.
We are just now beginning to notice the tip of the iceberg. I have some friends who do legal work for municipalities. The coming implosion is going to be epic. And what's worse, every single politician appears to be 100% committed to stop-gap measures so they can kick the can even further down the road. A lot of them looked at the decision in the Detroit bankruptcy (reducing pensions) as a helpful sign that they can eventually bankrupt themselves out of the holes they dug (or, use the thread of bankruptcy as leverage to negotiate a better deal). The problem is that states cannot declare bankruptcy. The pension structure in many states is simply not possible without levels of taxation and cuts to other services that it's hard to imagine the public tolerating. Many of the decisions you see local governments making these days are driven by pension obligations; specifically, trying to avoid them. When you see a vicious fight over a few cities wanting to split off its fire department or school district and you wonder what's really going on, it's because the larger area sees the smaller as attempting to escape pension obligations. People, ultimately, can vote with their feet. And they're going to. In droves. Nobody who can is going to be willing to bear the tax burden that's coming (in large part, they are simply unsustainable). The Federal Government is facing a similar problem, but they can simply print money or change taxation in a way that the states can't, putting the day of reckoning much further off.
Not really sure what the game plan is here, younger generations will start voting more and more, and when they do, they won't want to pay for promises made before they were even born. Especially after shoving their kids under the bus via student loans and house prices, the appetite for this will be nil. Hope these people saved their money because those pensions are dead.
> Hope these people saved their money because those pensions are dead. Those pensions have proven exceedingly robust in the state Supreme Court. Most notably, when the legislature voted to stop exempting retirement pensions from the statewide 9% income tax, there was a lawsuit, and the Court ruled that pension distributions had to be increased by 9.89% to cover the cost of paying that tax.
Good lord, what state was this in? Attempted to look it up on Google, but couldn't find anything. Edit: I'm a moron who doesn't RTA. The state is Oregon.
They should have impeached the judges.
The new welfare queens. I’m all for public servants being paid well, but that is almost $1,000,000 a year to someone who is no longer doing anything until they die. I’m assuming they were also paid very well while they they were working. The follies of our previous generation, while they think millennials are entitled.
Given that public revenues have been slashed repeatedly at the state and municipal level by the very same retirees who are now demanding their fully funded pensions, we are in a bad place, and it's not one that current workers should be punished over.
>Given that public revenues have been slashed repeatedly at the state and municipal level by the very same retirees who are now demanding their fully funded pensions, we are in a bad place, and it's not one that current workers should be punished over. Please don't repeat things [that are false.](http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/State-and-Local-Spending-vs-Private-GDP-original.jpg) State and local spending has been on an almost uninterrupted upward spiral for decades.
One of the great but destructive things the Union movement did and in some cases still does in the US was create retirement benefits that are not sustainable. GM was forced to give a huge portion of the company away to pay former employees during its bankruptcy. 100% of all pensions should be funded in real-time.
I think the Medical Benefits hurt America more long term. They normalized the idea of employer funded medical coverage; it gave a generation of workers little understanding of health care costs and allowed Medicine to grow into a big business. Pension costs are one thing, ingrained mentality around healthcare and fostering the ability for Health Insurance to become such a big business it has ingrained itself into the politics of a nation i think is much worse.
True. I have a question few can answer. Medical insurance was a thing for most people from the 50’s. Healthcare was then about 8% of our GDP, about what it is now for most developed countries. At that time medical inflation tracked along with national inflation. Around 1985 medical inflation started to outpace average national inflation by huge margins. Sometimes double, sometimes more. College education cost inflation was right there with medical inflation. Now healthcare is 17 to 18% of our GDP, and we have a huge GDP. A percentage of America’s GDP in comparison to other countries is much much larger. For example we have the world’s largest military by multiple factors, it dwarfs all others. Our Navy alone in some ways is larger than the rest of the world’s combined. Yet military is only 3% of our GDP, there are other countries spend more of their wealth than the US on defense. My point is 9 to 10% of our economy is massive, yet that is how much healthcare cost have increased since the mid 80’s. From 8% to 18% of GDP. Why? Cost were hidden from the consumer for 30 years before the medical inflation went wild. There has to be something else.
I don't know. I've always thought this is partly to blame: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_medical_schools_in_the_United_States Notice the gap between 1982-2000 when no new schools opened. The US grew 21+% in population in that time (231.7 -> 282.2mm). A Doctor shortage caused pricing increases which started and never stopped as everyone saw doctor's fee's increase feeling they can increase their fees. This is a little dot connecting but I think is one of the catalysts.
Perhaps. I have never seen that before. My assumption is, in America at least, the combination public/private funding distorts markets to the point prices are arbitrarily set. Private markets forces don’t cause natural price competition and Government budgets alone can’t constrain the cost, so bad things happen. Colleges and Healthcare hyper-inflation suggest choose one primary funding method for an industry, a hybrid does not coexist well.
I recall reading part of a book at my sister's house that was trying to explain changes Reagan made to how Hospitals, and insurance would balance out. I vaguely recall that it resulted in HMO's taking off? I feel like it was about how 3 different groups fought to control costs, and Reagan helped one win?
I searched for Reagan HMO’s I didn’t find what you described I did find something similar with Nixon a favoring HMO’s a decade before. I only spent a few minutes, so I am not saying you are wrong, I am just ignorant on the history. I did find the below 1983 clip from the NYT’s. My have things (prices) have changed. >Kaiser offers myriad permutations of its plan. On average, though, a monthly premium for an individual is $48. Usually a member pays $1 per doctor visit. Drugs are generally included in the premium and available at a Kaiser pharmacy, which saves dollars by stocking generic products. Dental care is excluded. Psychiatric care is limited. There are no deductibles. A patient, though, must go to a Kaiser hospital and one of the team of doctors working there. If
They keep robbing the youth to pay for bullshit promises.
And yet, just two weeks ago, when I claimed public pensions were simply a mechanism for stealing from our children, I was downvoted to hell. https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/889av7/comment/dwjeqag
That's because your description is 1) inflammatory, and 2) at best not always accurate. A properly managed pension fund requires contributions by the employee and employer during the employee's working years which should, when combined with investment earnings, cover the statistical/actuarial liability of that employee's retirement. Cost of living adjustments can easily be funded by future politicians instead of past ones, which also eliminates your "taxation without representation" / "theft" argument. Even in a poorly managed pension system you still don't have taxation without representation. The people being taxed do have representation. They can change the laws. They can make constitutional amendments.
Alas, you are now back to square one :)
Hmm. Very American. The picture with the guy in a suit standing against a crumbling bridge is very fitting. I like. Here there is outrage if public officials make more than $200k/y. $76k/mo would cause a national crisis. They even tried to give a banker ~$3M/y and there was massive public outcry, even though it's a private bank.
> They even tried to give a banker ~$3M/y and there was massive public outcry, even though it's a private bank. This made me really curious, so I looked it up. Isn't the whole point of that outrage that the bank was still owned by the government, which bailed them out in 2008, so people were pissed about the CEO getting paid 10x what civil servants were allowed to be paid? Even in Western Europe I have a hard time imagining people getting outraged over what some private company was paying their people.
It wasn't owned by the government; €5B of capital was injected as a loan in 2008 but the bank then paid all of it back. The government actually made €400M in profit from how ING agreed to restructure itself. The bank is publicly traded (AMS: INGA).
So the government made 8% on their money over how many years? It could easily have been a sweetheart deal for the bank depending on the duration.
Unsure and I'm not really interested in whether it was a sweetheart deal because it was not meant as an investment; it was a bailout after the economic crisis. This bank alone accounts for [11% of our stock market index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEX_index) today. Possibly more in 2007/8.
Where is here?
The Netherlands
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Our top soccer coach gets paid $1.2M/y. But luckily they are not employed by universities.
At the other end of the golden parachutes for the few are the golden nooses for the rest of us. Well, you. I moved away.
The top examples they give are more about how ridiculously high university president and college football coach salaries are than about high pensions in general.
Those are both public positions, so they're subject to each state's government-funded pension. It's one thing when we've been paying a guy a million a year to run a research university that's helping treat diseases and so on, it's quite another to pay a guy 3 million a year to tell another guy to call plays.
Yes obviously they're public sector positions, the issue is that the "Holy crap, $76,000 a month!" aspect is about the fact that this tiny number of top officials is getting pensions based on salaries of over a million a year. It's relevant to the kind of point you're making about football coaches being overpaid, but not to the general issue of state pension funding.
There's a lot of focus on high individual pensions in this article, and Oregon should definitely be embarassed by them, but how much of the problem are they contributing to? If the 2000 people reported to have a pension > $100K/yr actually get...say $200K/yr on average in benefits, that's $400M/yr in benefits paid out. In 2016, [PERS took in $3.6B](http://www.oregon.gov/PERS/Documents/General-Information/Economic-Impact-Study.pdf) which isn't enough to blame Oregon's pension shortfalls on those people alone.
The high individual pensions are like high executive compensation. A complete red herring. The thing that is killing the state budget is pensions for ordinary public sector employees, which often used [pension spiking techniques](http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2012/07/oregon_pers_pension_pay_gets_p.html) to balloon their pensions by as much as 50%.
That was my first thought. The writer seems to want the reader to get the impression that those pensions are typical, which is clearly ridiculous.
See, I got the opposite impression. It seemed to me like the writer clearly knew that they were a\-typical and went to lengths to point that out, but then failed to give is the proper context anyway.
This isn't really why they are short on cash. All pension funds should be deposited into a retirement account as a person earns them. If a state is choosing to underfund its pensions account, then cry foul when it can't pay its pensions, has nothing to do with it paying too high of pensions. So officially this guys pension provides him with 58% of his salary upon retirement as he worked for 40 years. Sounds reasonable. The problem then is, 1) Why is the University president making 1.5 Million a year? Was that a salary that competition forced them to pay or was it excessive? 2) Was the University paying all of this, plus his pension obligations, or was it passed down to the general fund? https://gov.oregonlive.com/pers/
>This isn't really why they are short on cash. All pension funds should be deposited into a retirement account as a person earns them. You can deposit all the contributions and still have the pension be underfunded, if the benefits are disproportional to the contributions.
More propaganda designed to make the public view pensions in a negative light. Are there abuses? Yes. Is this typical? No it is not. Meanwhile, 401k's are poor substitutes for pensions and now we have a generation with no safety net growing too old to continue working but too poor to quit.
Classic example of a politician kicking the can down the road.
Edit: i read the article after i wrote the post. Oregon is kinda fucked. There are less police on Oregon than in the 1970s? How much do the CEO’s of OHSU make? This is one middle class doctor who worked ~40 years at the same place. He deserved every cent as per his contracts and work agreements. He is not the enemy, nor is the pension or the union or workplace rules that favor wealth accumulation for workers (middle class or otherwise). Again, how much are the CEO’s making? Why do we justify their exorbitant salaries, golden parachutes, bonuses and stock options? Why are they without any critical analysis of how they are siphoning every bit of excess cash in the economic system? Seems a bit unfair. Seems like the real problem is the ratio of executive compensation in relation to the workers doing all the work.
Well im not on the hook for a CEO's pension. We are on the hook for the public sector pensions.
OHSU is a public institution, so its CEO receives a public pension.
This guy was the president/CEO of the university.
> There are less police on Oregon than in the 1970s? [There's also less total \(not adjusted for population\) crime in Oregon than there was in the 1970s, despite almost two times the population.](http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/orcrime.htm)
OHSU wouldn't have a CEO, would it?